Wide-area networking has become prevalent, particularly with the creation of a globally-based WAN, the Internet. The Internet is a network based on the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) The TCP/IP protocol is well-suited to connectivity between a wide-variety of machines, permitting a great diversity in the types of machines which are connected to the Internet.
With the great diversity of machines available to connect to the Internet has also come a great diversity of information and content available via the Internet. Users of the Internet can, quite literally, find information on sports, news, weather, computers, health, public filings, classifieds, and more. Users have a number of different forums in which to view this wealth of data: encyclopedia sites, dictionary sites, dedicated-topic sites, newspaper/magazine article sites, file directory sites, and the like. Additionally, users have a number of different options for the format in which to receive the data available on the Internet: HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Gopher, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), etc. Also, users have a choice of languages in which to receive information.
With such a great realm of information and data available to users, it is becoming more and more common for users to get “lost” on the Internet. Search engines are commonly available (such as Yahoo!™, Alta Vista™, HotBot™, and the like). However, the results from searches run through these engines can be overwhelming. For example, recently a search on the term “Chicago” yielded more than 7,000 resulting Internet sites.
As an answer to this problem, many companies have developed “portal” sites, directed to bringing content to the users in a more user-friendly manner. These sites contain directories of information available on the Internet. Frequently, these portal sites feature an editorial selection process or rating features, in order to direct the user to the “best” source of the information the user seeks. Sometimes these editorial selections or rating features are influenced by advertising dollars, making it difficult for the user to determine which sites truly have the information desired.
Recently, some portal sites have permitted the user the ability to customize a portal site. Users can specify a set of information to be displayed each time they visit the site. These customized portals frequently operate on the basis of a “cookie” stored on the user's machine. The cookie is a type of identifying file. When the Internet site is first accessed, the site looks to see if a pre-defined cookie is on the machine accessing the site. If it is, then the user's customized site appears; if not, then the user is prompted to enter a username/password or prompted to create a new customized portal.
Customized portals permit users to specify the types of news headlines they would like to see, along with the potential to specify weather reports, horoscope reports, sports synopses and the like. A user may chose which of these types of information (and more) to be displayed upon startup. The same information is then displayed to the user each time the site is accessed, until the user manually modifies the site to display other information.
While customized portals do provide greater access for the common user to enter the Internet, they do not yet fully-utilize the potential of the networked computer. Specifically, the customized portals, like the original portal sites and like most of the sites accessed at the startup of an Internet connection, are static. The problem is that no user lives in a static world.
What is needed is a portal system and method to provide a user dynamic information based upon a set of intelligence rules such that the user can efficiently reach points of changing interest on the Internet. What is also needed is a system and method for making such a system user-friendly and comprehensive, so that it can be commonly used for a number of different applications.